Mozilla’s B2G to be called Firefox OS, will ship in 2013

The platform has gained support from additional carriers and handset makers.

Several new device manufacturers and mobile carriers have lined up to support Mozilla’s mobile operating system. The software platform, which is based on Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko (B2G) project, will be called Firefox OS when it launches on handsets next year.

Mozilla began working on the B2G project last year, aiming to offer a truly open alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The B2G application stack and runtime environment are built around standards-based Web technologies instead of platform-specific development tools and frameworks.

Alongside B2G, Mozilla is also working on a complementary effort to extend Web standards with capabilities that are needed by mobile applications, such as APIs for power management and telephony. Mozilla hopes to ensure that the open Web will provide a rich platform for application development that is competitive with the native stacks supplied by rival platforms.

Telefónica became the first network operator to adopt the platform when it announced a partnership with Mozilla earlier this year. Mozilla announced several new partners today, including Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Telecom Italia, and Telenor.

Hardware manufacturers TCL and ZTE have committed to building the first Firefox OS devices, which will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. The very first Firefox OS phone will be available to consumers in Brazil next year through Telefónica’s Vivo brand.

Ars met with Mozilla evangelist Christian Heilmann on Friday to discuss the status of the Boot2Gecko project. He explained that the platform is built to run on entry-level devices, primarily for the developing world. The idea is to give feature phone users an affordable new device that will offer a more complete Web experience.

Heilmann insists that B2G is not intended to compete with contemporary smartphone platforms such as Android and iOS. It’s worth noting, however, that Android has a growing presence in developing markets and is rapidly scaling down to work on feature phones.

During the opening keynote at Google I/O last week, the search giant touted Android’s massive growth in India, Thailand, and Brazil. It seems like Android and Firefox OS are eventually going to be rivals in those markets. The truly open and inclusive nature of B2G development could help make it attractive to carriers and handset manufacturers.

Unlike Android, Mozilla’s mobile operating system has been developed in the open since it was first announced. The code is published in a public repository as it is written, so there are no privileged parties who have more access or control than others. Mozilla’s platform also has a low barrier to entry for participation, making it more inclusive to independent contributors.

Heilmann said that the lightweight architecture of B2G makes it an ideal choice for affordable devices with lower hardware specifications than conventional smartphones. The idea that a Web-based technology stack could be less resource intensive than a platform largely built around native code may seem counterintuitive, but it works in practice.

Firefox OS is a much thinner platform, consisting of Mozilla’s Gecko HTML rendering engine, a Linux kernel, and a few background services. It doesn’t have all of the complex mobile middleware layers that are usually found in mobile operating systems. It is heavily optimized and relies on hardware-accelerated rendering to deliver good performance without heavy resource consumption.

Firefox users are accustomed to seeing the browser grow to consume multiple gigabytes of memory on the desktop during intensive browsing sessions, but the rendering engine can operate efficiently with much less. According to Mozilla, the B2G platform can run acceptably well in an environment with as little as 256MB of RAM.

We asked Heilmann several questions about the platform's capabilities. Third-party applications will be built largely with HTML and JavaScript, using open standards and the new Web APIs that Mozilla is working to turn into standards. Users will be able to install applications from Mozilla’s application marketplace and run them offline when connectivity isn’t available.

Although modern Web standards provide a lot of rich functionality for building interactive experiences, there are still some limitations and areas where the Web’s native security model will pose challenges. The lack of support for conventional TCP sockets, for example, could make it difficult to build a traditional offline IMAP e-mail client for B2G.

The platform will not come with a mail client when it ships on devices later next year, though users will be able to load various webmail services in a device’s Web browser. According to Heilmann, market research in Brazil has shown that text messaging (which is fully supported on the B2G platform thanks to new JavaScript APIs) is much more important than e-mail to Mozilla’s target audience in the region.

Firefox OS is obviously a very different critter than Android and iOS, but the growing amount of enthusiasm from mobile carriers suggests that the platform may have what it takes to succeed in the developing world.

Update: the article originally erroneously indicated that Firefox OS would ship later this year, but it was updated to reflect the expected 2013 launch date.

Update 2: Mozilla says that Heilmann was incorrect about the mail client. A new pure TCP socket API that will be available to applications is being used to build a conventional mail client that will ship with B2G.

64 Reader Comments

Talk about reinventing the webOS wheel. They should just adopt Open webOS, help the community prepare it for release in the fall, then get a Gecko-based browser running on it. I really wish they would...I can't think of a browser that would be worse than the one that comes with webOS now.

Talk about reinventing the webOS wheel. They should just adopt Open webOS, help the community prepare it for release in the fall, then get a Gecko-based browser running on it. I really wish they would...I can't think of a browser that would be worse than the one that comes with webOS now.

There are some significent differences between the two systems.B2G's entire ui, with no exceptions that Ive seen , are made from html, css and js. More importantly, perhaps, they are endeavoring to make their apis part of the web standards.Lastly, completely open development (excluding drivers, which not even Google seems to be able to do anything about).

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

I like the idea, except for the html/javascript apps part. To be a truly useful OS, it needs a native api and toolkits.

I've had it with endless app updates. The vast majority of apps can be browser pages. Long live the cloud.

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Offline storage. IIRC, Mozilla has specified a 3 response process for offline storage. The first allows the standard 5MB of storage. The next increases it to, IIRC, 50MB. The last allows unlimited storage.Besides, we already have this to some extent now with offline web apps in their own windows on the desktop (using Chrome or Mozilla's Prism).

Talk about reinventing the webOS wheel. They should just adopt Open webOS, help the community prepare it for release in the fall, then get a Gecko-based browser running on it. I really wish they would...I can't think of a browser that would be worse than the one that comes with webOS now.

They're close, but I think webOS and B2G have different directions.

I've lost track since I swapped my Pre for an Android phone, but if I recall: webOS was about a WebKit-based frontend, on top of Java-based backend services for hardware & privileged data access. I seem to remember hearing node.js was on the way, too. And underneath was nice, clean Linux - I remember getting homebrew and ipkg going and installing Apache just for the hell of it. Either way, webOS was an awesome stack when I worked with it, and really felt like the first to try using web tech from top to almost-bottom.

B2G on the other hand is a Gecko-based frontend atop a thin Linux layer. Hardware access and the like will be through new browser APIs - built into Gecko - that Mozilla is working to standardize. That means "B2G apps" will be web apps using APIs that other vendors beyond Mozilla are free to implement. That could be other mobile OS makers, or even (especially?) app wrapper vendors like PhoneGap or Titanium. The difference here is that B2G will be web tech all the way down - because Mozilla is working on introducing the missing mobile APIs as real new web APIs.

FWIW, there was a native port of Firefox / Fennec to webOS someone at Mozilla was doing for fun, but support & interest kind of fizzled.

And, I don't think webOS has an effort to standardize web-based app APIs. It might be cool to see webOS implement the APIs that B2G will offer, but not sure what webOS has to offer to B2G.

Oh, actually, I can think of a giant thing webOS has that B2G is short on: Common UI widgets and layout tools. (Mojo, and then Enyo, right?) It's all just HTML/JS/CSS, but I remember webOS offered a whole pile of ready-to-use widgets with common platform look and feel. B2G doesn't *quite* have that - it's still at the "it's all HTML/JS/CSS" stage.

With every new release of Firefox/Chrome, they generally fix the security holes that were found in their previous versions while at the same time adding new features with potential new security holes (and of course bugs, since the release schedule is too short for thorough testing). It's a false sense of security to think that upgrading with new features means there are fewer security holes -- it just means they haven't been found yet.

With every new release of Firefox/Chrome, they generally fix the security holes that were found in their previous versions while at the same time adding new features with potential new security holes (and of course bugs, since the release schedule is too short for thorough testing). It's a false sense of security to think that upgrading with new features means there are fewer security holes -- it just means they haven't been found yet.

I think you've just described the whole of modern software development on the web - browsers, apps, sites, and all.

I am so tired of "web" operating systems (WebOS, ChromeOS, FirefoxOS). Damn it, an operating system is what manages the hardware, resources, drivers, and provides APIs for higher-layer applications and functions. The only place web technologies have there is the API's - and even then, they're going to be a fraction of the functionality (UI/data storage only, really).

This is the stupidest fucking idea in the world. I shudder to think of how many giant mountains of labor have been spent trying to hammer a document delivery system into an app platform. And now the browser as the OS? For fucks sake! And people said emacs was bad!

I am so tired of "web" operating systems (WebOS, ChromeOS, FirefoxOS). Damn it, an operating system is what manages the hardware, resources, drivers, and provides APIs for higher-layer applications and functions. The only place web technologies have there is the API's - and even then, they're going to be a fraction of the functionality (UI/data storage only, really).

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

The article says that Mozilla wants to extend web standards to include things like power management. If successful, does that mean random sites will be able to dick around with your device settings? Because that worked so well for ActiveX ....

Plus, if it's part of a standard, that implies that non-b2g devices would also be manageable over the web.

The article says that Mozilla wants to extend web standards to include things like power management. If successful, does that mean random sites will be able to dick around with your device settings? Because that worked so well for ActiveX ....

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

Not sure if serious...? From the descriptions here, it sounds like my absolutely decrepit iPhone 3G (which my kids use to play video) has more features and is more modern than B2G.

I know no one here would be caught dead with an old iPhone 3G--128MB RAM! 400MHz CPU!--but it's really not that bad. I even have the most recent iOS on it; I know the conventional wisdom is that this is a big performance issue, but I haven't experienced problems. I know it's not a speed demon, but a few years ago it was my primary phone and somehow I got by! For web browsing, its biggest problem really isn't RAM limitations anyway; if you could magically swap in a 1GHz CPU I'd venture to say it'd be usable for web browsing today.

I'm not begrudging Firefox for putting in 256MB--that gives them headroom and it's super cheap--but it does seem like if their target is the super-low-end, feature-phone market, they're going to have a hard time competing with the 3GS.

I am so tired of "web" operating systems (WebOS, ChromeOS, FirefoxOS). Damn it, an operating system is what manages the hardware, resources, drivers, and provides APIs for higher-layer applications and functions.

That's what the Linux kernel in B2G does.

Quote:

The only place web technologies have there is the API's - and even then, they're going to be a fraction of the functionality (UI/data storage only, really).

Web API's, yes. Web OS, no.

And that's what the Firefox part of B2G does. Apps run inside Gecko using HTML/JS/CSS based API's.

Not sure if serious...? From the descriptions here, it sounds like my absolutely decrepit iPhone 3G (which my kids use to play video) has more features and is more modern than B2G.

I know no one here would be caught dead with an old iPhone 3G--128MB RAM! 400MHz CPU!--but it's really not that bad. I even have the most recent iOS on it; I know the conventional wisdom is that this is a big performance issue, but I haven't experienced problems. I know it's not a speed demon, but a few years ago it was my primary phone and somehow I got by! For web browsing, its biggest problem really isn't RAM limitations anyway; if you could magically swap in a 1GHz CPU I'd venture to say it'd be usable for web browsing today.

I'm not begrudging Firefox for putting in 256MB--that gives them headroom and it's super cheap--but it does seem like if their target is the super-low-end, feature-phone market, they're going to have a hard time competing with the 3GS.

Did you read the article? Especially the part about what Mozilla's target market is? It's the market that doesn't have a 3GS, and doesn't want to pay for Apple's 1st world profit margins.

The article says that Mozilla wants to extend web standards to include things like power management. If successful, does that mean random sites will be able to dick around with your device settings? Because that worked so well for ActiveX ....

Plus, if it's part of a standard, that implies that non-b2g devices would also be manageable over the web.

There is a much stronger security model than what ActiveX had. Have you gone to a site that uses the Geolocation API? Check out http://html5demos.com/geo/. Notice how it asks your permission first before it enables the technology. The spec is defined such that this prompt cannot be disabled via the API. All of the other new specs that Mozilla is producing use at *least* this level of security, and in some cases it's even more difficult for a user to enable to prevent malicious sites from compromising the device.

I'm not saying it will be bulletproof (no software is), but comparing the security of this model to the security of ActiveX is like comparing the security of Win7 to Win98.

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

I like the idea, except for the html/javascript apps part. To be a truly useful OS, it needs a native api and toolkits.

So... you like the idea, except for the whole idea of it. What part of it did you like, again?

I like the linux kernel part, the more open development part, the firefox browser part, the less complicated system part. Although if having a less complicated system means that you have to run every app with a browser engine, then forget it. Html/javascripts apps will always be laggy and limited compared to native apps.

I like the idea, except for the html/javascript apps part. To be a truly useful OS, it needs a native api and toolkits.

So... you like the idea, except for the whole idea of it. What part of it did you like, again?

I like the linux kernel part, the more open development part, the firefox browser part, the less complicated system part. Although if having a less complicated system means that you have to run every app with a browser engine, then forget it. Html/javascripts apps will always be laggy and limited compared to native apps.

Don't kid yourself, Mozilla's using Linux because it's free and stable. not because of some honor to OSS or any of that bullshit, their dominant reasoning is it's free.

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

No, it doesn't I just decimated your point, you can stand BY your point, but that just makes you a fucking idiot.

No, the point is that he's complaining that new software requires more RAM than old software. The fact that iOS 6 requires 256MB and not 512MB makes no difference, it's still more than iOS 3 (which is what his first-gen Touch runs) requires. And since you somehow couldn't figure that out, I guess that makes you the "fucking idiot".

edit: BTW, that word "decimated"? It doesn't mean what you think it means.

So you're using a 3 year old browser and comparing it to the needs of a modern one. Congratulations. So for your next trick, why don't you complain about Apple needing 512MB of RAM for iOS6 when your original iPod touch only needed 128MB.

No, it doesn't I just decimated your point, you can stand BY your point, but that just makes you a fucking idiot.

No, the point is that he's complaining that new software requires more RAM than old software. The fact that iOS 6 requires 256MB and not 512MB makes no difference, it's still more than iOS 3 (which is what his first-gen Touch runs) requires. And since you somehow couldn't figure that out, I guess that makes you the "fucking idiot".

edit: BTW, that word "decimated"? It doesn't mean what you think it means.

Well he could just eliminate every tenth word from your quote, although I don't really know how to make the rest of the words do the killing themselves... Too bad decimation has lost its original meaning in Latin, it made for one hell of a punishment for not fighting well in the roman army.